


make you better

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: ...yeah., Ableism, Background Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Banned Together Bingo 2020, Canon Asexual Character, Canon-Atypical Emotional Awareness, Did you know interrupting people to answer questions is a form of hyperactivity?, Gen, Implied Aphobia, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Has ADHD, Missing Scene, Past/Referenced Outing, Pre-Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, References to Jon’s disordered eating, Season/Series 04, Self-Injury (Discussed), Somewhere around MAG155 Cost of Living, could be canon-compliant, which is still not exactly saying much
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:54:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24334666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: “So,” Georgie says, after a moment. “You’re still… Doing this to yourself.” She doesn’t have to gesture — the meaning’s clear enough — she doesn’t have to, but she does anyway, taking in the office and implying the stretch of the Archives beyond and finding all of it wanting.“Oh,” Jon says, “I don’t think it’s just myself I’ve been doing things to.”Unsettled by her conversation with Martin, Georgie’s set her mind to confronting Jon about the choices he has left. It goes about as could be expected.
Relationships: Georgie Barker & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 29
Kudos: 199
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	make you better

**Author's Note:**

> This is my “Accurate Depictions of Ableism” fill. Some details on what that means are **in the end notes.**
> 
> Title refers to [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq76aQRmbQA), but more because it wouldn’t get out of my head while drafting than anything.

“I talked to Martin,” Georgie says without any preamble whatsoever.

Jon swallows and sets down the folder he’d been reading through. He’d tried to give her some illusion of privacy, of being on an equal plane, once he Saw her here well in advance of Melanie’s actual appointment time and heading deliberately for his office, but that would never have extended to pretending shock when she opened the door. “Y-you did? Is he—”

“What did you _do_ to him?”

She sounds so disgusted Jon takes a second to realize the question’s functionally nonsense. “What did I— Georgie, I’ve barely seen him in months! Since I, since I woke up. He’s _avoiding_ me!”

Georgie breathes out, hard, but Jon can’t really tell if that expression on her is surprise. “Yeah? I guess I can’t blame him.”

“What—” Jon blinks rapidly, holding the edge of his desk by confused reflex. Having Seen her coming did not, apparently, extend in any way to not being caught off guard. “What are you _talking about_?” he asks, voice cracking slightly.

“I just… Remember when I told you last year? That you needed something in the way of human perspective in your life? Before you went and got yourself — blown up and turned into — this?”

The question’s rhetorical. “ _Yes_ , but—”

“So I’m not _surprised_ you figured out how to get rid of your last human anchor, Jon.” For all the mystifying content, this conversation, this tone is all too familiar. “Just disappointed.”

“I didn’t do anything to him,” Jon says softly. Would that he had, somehow. Somehow. “Is— Did he seem all right?”

“He seemed like an absolute prick, does that count?” she snaps, which takes him aback almost enough to blink. (Almost.) “The way he talked about Melanie, I— you know what, never mind.”

“No, no, I want to know—” Anything, everything he can about Martin, if it has to be at this distance. About— Is he standing up for himself more? Is that something he would do? Jon should worry and he does, he _does_ , but the idea of Martin talking back to more than just attempts at human contact warms him. He tries not to smile, it’s off topic enough. “What did he—”

“That’s not what I came here to talk to you about,” Georgie interrupts him. “Just— if he’s practically as far gone as you are I guess it’s on me to say… something.”

Jon chews on his lip, thinks of keeping his mouth shut as if he were holding up his empty palms instead. _I won’t Ask, look how much I won’t Ask, please go on._ (He wants to Ask, so badly; but it blends easily enough into the ever-present gnawing in the pit of his stomach. He can ignore both needs together well enough.)

“This is all so fucked up,” she says, finally. “I didn’t expect him to convince himself… I thought with the way you talked about him you might have one good influence left. God knows I can’t do it anymore.”

Jon’s mouth is suddenly very dry. “Do… what?”

“I tried—” Georgie throws one hand out, a broad, ambiguous gesture that still makes him jump a bit. “When you were at my place? And I tried getting you to stop recording, I tried getting you to step away, but you just ran back _here_ —”

“I had to,” he bites out. Remembers, a brief sense-memory thought, the combined listlessness and bone-deep ache of it. And how much worse he now knows it can get. “I had to.”

“You wanted to,” she shoots back. (It’s not that she’s wrong. She isn’t. It’s just that part — the wanting things part — wasn’t, is never, actually the most important.) She sighs. Tries, visibly, to relax, to find a soft reset on the conversation. She was always better than Jon at that; much like a lot of other things. “So,” Georgie says, after a moment. “You’re still…”

“Alive?” Jon spits, tense, suddenly, like she’d just calmed down by displacing it onto him.

Georgie looks at him, implacable. “Doing this to yourself.” She doesn’t have to gesture — the meaning’s clear enough — she doesn’t have to, but she does anyway, taking in the office and implying the stretch of the Archives beyond and finding all of it wanting.

“Oh,” he says nastily, burning in his throat like an unanswered question or a shot of whiskey, “I don’t think it’s just myself I’ve been doing things to.”

“Jon!” Far from being dissuaded, she sounds relieved to have found an in, some opening he didn’t know he was leaving. “You always do this, you push people away so you have an excuse to tell yourself there’s no point in trying.”

He blinks. “In trying what.”

“To do _better_ , what do you think?”

“Oh, like Melanie is trying?” He supposes he’s not surprised exactly that it was apparently meant to be obvious, but… “Why do all of you—”

“There’s no need for that _fucking_ tone, Jon.” _Her_ tone genuinely shocks him, and not just from the whiplash. “She has to deal with plenty from you as it is.”

“Oh, _she_ has to—” The guilt he’s expecting doesn’t come. “This isn’t about defending her, it’s, it’s about you. About your—”

“Don’t.”

“What exactly do you think—” Jon catches up to his mouth, more or less, too late. Almost too late. “No. No, I… I’m, I’m sorry, I…”

Georgie shifts her attention on him critically. “Are you really?”

“What’s that s— I don’t, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Being sorry requires _remorse_ , Jon. It means you regret what you’re doing and you actually _want_ to change.” She takes an angrier breath than Jon’s capable of understanding the provenance of; at least, without asking. And he can’t. “Is that even something you’re capable of anymore?”

“Of wanting to be something else?” Jon supposes that would depend, as many things do now, on quite a lot of technicalities. He doubts that’s what Georgie wants, but he’s not sure what she’ll take.”

“Of _thinking_ for long enough to remember that what you’re doing is wrong.”

Quiet, honest, perfectly aware of what he’s doing with it, Jon says, “I’m just asking questions.”

Georgie just says, “So that’d be a no, then.” She sighs. “I used to think you were better than this, Jon, I really did. Every time you asked me—”

Her cadence has shifted to that of an argument that’s been finished in advance, and Jon stiffens. “Georgie.”

“—to come with you when you thought you’d found the right doctor, every time I _believed_ you there was a good reason they weren’t worth working with, and then you got the job— _here_ , and you stopped even pretending—”

“Georgie,” he says again, throat tight. And, “Please.”

“But I have wanted to believe that you were better than that,” she finishes, unrelenting. “Than watching every possible chance go by and not— taking any of it.”

It’s odd that his throat feels this raw, Jon thinks. In the grand scheme of things he’s hardly been talking at all. “So, Melanie does— does live up to your standards, then?” he says, drier than would be altogether ideal.

“Melanie—” Georgie’s mouth twitches a bit ambiguously but not in a way Jon ever would take for a positive, at her being brought up again. “Yeah. Fine. She’s not like you. And I— I pick her up after and she looks wretched but it’s worth it, the amount of work she’s put in is just— Okay, this is still none of your fucking business, Jon.”

“I—” Jon casts about for something that might count as a peace offering. As usual, he can find the truth and not much else. But… “She’s been, I can tell she’s been doing better—” _since I cut the bullet out of her leg, anyway_ “— and I’m, I’m glad. Really.”

“Really?” she echoes critically. “Because she did tell me what you did to her. Before.”

Jon thinks, a bit indignant, _Basira helped_. He thinks something vague and unformed about this presumably meaning they both see him in their respective nightmares for distinctly different reasons. “I wanted to help,” is what he does say. He doesn’t add that he succeeded, doesn’t ask what good exactly does Georgie think a few hours of privatized DBT a month would have done for the Melanie with Slaughter pumped endlessly into her bloodstream.

Which is to say he’s not actually surprised at the response when Georgie scoffs at him. “Sure,” she says, something between pity and disgust. “With the improv basement surgery. You know what actually _helping_ looks like?”

Jon… well. Jon stares. It’s not particularly innovative.

“No. And you know it. You know you need help yourself,” Georgie says, sounding like she’s taking that as a concession.

Jon’s not sure, admittedly, what she wouldn’t have taken as such; he can’t think of anything. “And that ‘help’— I—” He stumbles trying to adjust to it. “Melanie lies to her therapist, she, she can _do_ that.” Wonders if Georgie will pick up on the double meaning there.

“You talked about—?” (So probably not, then.)

He blinks. “Yes?”

“Fine.”

Giving up on understanding what that response is supposed to mean, the flatness of it and the way she looks away from him, Jon goes on, “She can do that, Georgie, I can’t, if I left this building and tried to just tell someone everything you’re disappointed in me for, they—”

“Oh come off it, Jon,” Georgie snaps, “no one needs to buy into your spooky bullshit just to be able to tell you that hurting people is wrong.”

“Oh,” Jon says. Doesn’t bother keeping the misery out of that one syllable. He hadn’t expected, exactly, but… “So that’s it, it’s, it’s that simple.”

“Of _course_ it is, you’re the one who tries to make it stupid complicated—”

He thinks fleetingly of just how _long_ it took to understand what it meant when people turned conversation after conversation after conversation to social ineptitude or anxiety or his supposed _priorities_. “‘Tries’?”

She ignores it. “—It wouldn’t actually kill you to get it through your skull that you should treat other people like they’re human beings!”

“I…” Jon could resist it, obviously; could resist the slight smile. But he kind of can’t. “I thought I was.”

Georgie goes flat again. Flatter. “That’s not funny.”

“I know,” Jon says. Gently, even. That does actually just get her to _stop_ , for a long moment.

When she speaks again her tone makes him bristle all but instantly, and just like that he’s back where he started. “I know you always want to believe that what you’re doing is normal,” she says, “because then it’s, then it’s fine that you’re jumping down their throats with answers like that’s all someone would want or— but it’s _not_ , Jon, there’s not something intrinsically different about you and the things you do aren’t normal and those are both _true_.” Breathing between sentences, she looks like she’s daring him to chime in again, like she didn’t just steal the concept of a relevant answer from out his mouth where all he’s got are true ones anyway. “The only difference between you and other people is that they make— that they’ve ever made the effort. To connect with people, to care about what their actions do to others, to ever try to act any better than their first fucking impulse.”

Jon leaves the silence a moment — it presses on his eardrums like deep water — and then he says something stupider than even the usual. “Right,” he says. “Never could—could make myself connect to your satisfaction, could I.”

Georgie flushes. “This is not about sex.”

“Really? Because—” His ears feel hot but he feels _useful_ , however fleetingly, and usefully angry. That part’s his. Even Jon can tell that part’s supposed to — aside from the fighting and the early-twenties idiocy, and the endless fucking grind of thinking that being over eighteen wasn’t a death sentence in terms of ever finding a decent psychiatrist — but that part’s supposed to have been his. “Because as of _last year_ ,” he says, mimicking her earlier intonation on the timeframe, “as far as I can tell you were still telling everyone who’d listen that I just wouldn’t—”

“ _Oh_ ,” Georgie says, all granite and ice and a confidence she knows the rules he’ll always lack, “I thought you weren’t supposed to believe in privacy anymore.” Jon stares at her, wordless — somehow, even with the tapes, with the laughter in Basira and Melanie’s voices _on_ the tapes, he’d managed not to expect simple tacit confirmation — a kind of humiliation he thought might have died with his body washing hotly across the back of his neck like it belongs there. “My mistake,” she says. “Won’t happen again.”

Jon looks at her. He doesn’t blink, but he doesn’t meet her eyes, either.

She does deflate, a little, after a bit of that. “That was— Okay. That wasn’t… fair. That wasn’t fair of me. I’m sorry.” Jon continues to experiment with saying nothing; once she’s let the apology stand a moment, Georgie goes on, “Anyway, it doesn’t— matter. The… petty interpersonal shit, we’re past that, it’s not… going to make any difference. None of that is what I came here to say.”

“No,” Jon says. “You came here to tell me that I shouldn’t have woken up from that coma, because—” She doesn’t know his body would have actually died if it were really the human sort of thing she thought he was, Jon realizes, like missing a step going up the stairs, even aside from the Georgie-specific fear he will never, ever get across to her. None of them do. As far as anyone alive knows, he would have just slept, just stayed almost-harmlessly dreaming from that hospital bed forever and never hurt another soul. They— they don’t know. He doesn’t know what to do with that. Finds his voice again instead, quick as he can. “Because you think I don’t have anyone to tell me for you, and you can’t let go of how much you don’t like what woke up.”

“What woke up,” she says back at him, like what he said wrong should somehow be obvious with it. “God, Jon, listen to yourself.”

“I generally do,” he says quietly. He used to not like his own voice recorded, yes, enough to try a bit to avoid it; but that’s very strange to think of now, if he thinks of it at all.

“I’m not trying to— say I wish you were _dead_ or something, Jesus Christ,” she goes on; aghast, more than a bit, like that should’ve been obvious to him too. “I still care that no one’s telling you to— to actually take care of yourself, Jon, that’s what I want to remind you about. Because there’s nothing left here but I can’t stand thinking that means it’s my fault you don’t have anyone in your life who’ll still think you could make a difference.”

“Basira doesn’t want me to talk to strangers,” Jon offers. He doesn’t think he wants to hear her thoughts firsthand on Daisy. He can imagine the general shape of them by now, the settled question of whether a friendship as comfortable as they’ve managed means they’re one or the other or both actually wallowing. That all comes through in his voice. He doesn’t even cringe at it.

“Yeah,” Georgie says flatly. “So stasis. Maybe. At best.”

That Jon can agree with her on (good Lord can he ever), and maybe she can tell, even though he says nothing. She’d always seemed better at reading him than he was; but, then again, when he knew that about her he was still human at the time.

“You just have to…” She sighs, heavy and mournful and short. “It’s still not complicated. No matter how much you try to tell yourself otherwise. It’s really very simple, Jon.”

He thinks, _Enlighten me._ Tries to keep it off his face. She’s never liked questions. She really wouldn’t like that one.

“You just have to, to—” And she still stumbles under his gaze, but that’s as little Jon’s own fault as he knows how to make it. “It still doesn’t have to be like that. You can actually make a choice, for the first time in your life—” She stops again. Slightly more his fault, this one. “What’s funny?”

“I… I did,” Jon says. He thinks about laughter. He’s been wondering what made her hate Oliver so much. “Make a choice. When, when I w—”

“Would you listen to me—”

If he ever knew what qualified as listening here— “Some choices are actually permanent, Georgie, in, including ones you don’t like, and I chose not to die!”

Georgie stops, closes her mouth. She doesn’t sound any less inclined to fight, just more considered again, when she says, “And you’ve convinced yourself _this_ is what living means?”

“I’m not convincing myself of anything.”

“You’re pretending. You’re pretending the shit you do to yourself and others could ever be okay.”

Jon feels his eyes widen and isn’t entirely sure why. “What makes you think I’m—”

“Because you’re obviously still at it!” Georgie steamrolls over him, and Jon almost wishes the confirmation was baffling. “I know, I— even if no one told me anything, I see you! You are pretending you don’t know you still could choose not to, you—”

“I know I had choices— I, I know that, why do you always act like I don’t know that?” Jon stops long enough to dial his voice back down; long enough for a moment of relief that angry shouting apparently doesn’t qualify as _Asking_ , even if he’d rather not have done the shouting option at all either. _Just because I wasn’t any better at that before than I was at being human_... “I made a choice and I live with it every day and presumably will _literally forever_. I think I— I think I know.”

“You can’t—” There’s an expression Jon does recognize by now, did half a decade ago even, the way belief flickers across Georgie’s face when she’s working through how to make a concept normal. It’s never prefaced good things when directed at him, Jon thinks. And it might as well be time to know that by now. “You’re saying you can’t die.”

“No. Not… as far as anyone can tell. I can’t.” Jon wonders, belatedly, if she’s taking that as a personal insult. It’s not like he can ask. He swallows, and tries not to Know. “But you’re asking me to want to.”

“I am telling you that you can still—”

“I don’t _want_ to! I didn’t want to and I don’t, Georgie, I _don’t!_ ”

That outburst hangs brightly in the air for longer than he intended, as Georgie just… looks at him, and looks at him, and Jon thinks she didn’t understand what he actually meant but— god, he’s not Elias, he can’t _make_ her know and he’s not sure there are words that would get through to her.

She’s just so…

Certain. Georgie has always been extremely _certain_ , of herself and of everything else. There’s nothing for Jon to do about that. Less still that she’d want.

“Fine,” she says, soft again. Controlled and sure of herself, in all the ways Jon just failed to be. Again. “Fine.”

The door closes under its own weight. Jon knows that. He knows that, he’s used to the sound it makes. He doesn’t startle at that sort of thing any more.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Content notes:** think the kind of conversation spread out across any time in season 4 when Georgie weighs in on whether Jon should be alive, but… with the opportunity to go in depth, to his face, about it, with the same kind of focus on whether mental health care should or would “fix” that part of him. There is also some throwing in his face of implications about his medical history while they were dating, and implied aphobia relating to the same period. (Georgie sees his sexual orientation as obviously unrelated to his disability status/neurotype, and Jon… doesn’t. Neither of them know that’s part of the conversation though.)  
> 
> 
> I think about what it means for characters to want to live/not want to die in this series [kind of a lot](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17493827).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Happy Endings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28916571) by [grossferatu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grossferatu/pseuds/grossferatu)




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